Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
1–10 of 239 posts
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#2I was not happy with features and UX of other productivity trackers. Most of the time tracking software is made for controlling employees or for billing clients and I just wanted an automated productivity measurement.
I tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standalone trackers lack features and most of them are not automatic.
So I started to play with OS X accessibility and got promising results pretty fast. Then there were about 14 months of writing some code once in a week or two and 3 months of almost full time polishing and gathering feedback.
Now it's marketing time. Qbserve did well on PH but almost no other sites picked it from there. This week I pitched about 70 journalists and bloggers who write about Mac or productivity apps but the results are not clear yet.
I'll be very grateful for advices on how to promote it better and overall feedback. Thank you!
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#3I was not happy with features and UX of other productivity trackers. Most of the time tracking software is made for controlling employees or for billing clients and I just wanted an automated productivity measurement. I tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standal…
I’d put the price on your website and not click on a button to buy/try before finding out the price. Also I’d “raise the price” and offer a launch special discount (or not raise the price and do the same).
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#4+1 for privacy and storing locally
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#5I was not happy with features and UX of other productivity trackers. Most of the time tracking software is made for controlling employees or for billing clients and I just wanted an automated productivity measurement. I tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standal…
this is super awesome. I've been using rescuetime for around two years, and although it's worked great I'd love to see more feature progress. Also there's no 2FA support which is quite scary for something with such sensitive data.
I love your dock icon as well. I was trying to build a custom version of that but for my tmux line, but rescuetime's API doesn't provide realtime info.
Will you open up some APIs for the data? I'd love to be able to do my own analysis and build my own tools. I'd also like to backup the data to s3
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#6Some feedback:
* Make the price more readily apparent on the landing page
* Tracking the '6,400 sites, apps and games' is great, but it would be good if I could find out if the ones I care about in that list!
* Make the above the fold screenshot bigger, I tried squinting/zooming before I realised I could scroll down
* Can I determine which things are productive/neutral/distractive? As I wouldn't want to buy it if that was static
Looks good though!
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#7Love the idea! Only suggestion would to be switch "Distractive" to "Unproductive" or "Distracting." I'm sure distractive is technically a word, but this is my first time hearing it. But that's just me. I may just have a limited vocabulary.
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#8I was not happy with features and UX of other productivity trackers. Most of the time tracking software is made for controlling employees or for billing clients and I just wanted an automated productivity measurement. I tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standal…
this is super awesome. I've been using rescuetime for around two years, and although it's worked great I'd love to see more feature progress. Also there's no 2FA support which is quite scary for something with such sensitive data. I love your dock icon as well. I was trying to build a custom version of that but for my tmux line, but rescuetime's API doesn't provide realtime info. Will you open up some APIs for the da…
Thank you! I'm researching what will be the best way to export data and connect to other apps (IFTTT probably).
In case somebody would like to export the tracked information: it's stored in SQLite in the ~/Library/Application\ Support/Qbserve/ and has a very simple scheme of HistoryLog tables for each month that refer to Activities table that refer to Categories and Apps tables.
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#9I've been using Qbserve for a couple weeks and I'm really happy with it. For me the best feature is just having that little number in the menu bar that shows what percentage of my time has been focused. This, more than any other timer or tracker, has been a simple and effective motivator for me to keep creating.
There are a lot of features I can imagine that would let me slice and dice tracked data better, but for a V1, this is something special.
Re: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
#10This looks like a simple way to keep track of time I spend on projects.
It would be perfect if it could also log more details such as what filename/project is open in Sublime, that way I know what I'm working on.